The Dei Today
It's not that bad
Suitably whipped up with anticipation, we braved the polite Christian ladies handing out leaflets about our lord Jesus Christ outside and attended one of the first showings of The Da Vinci Code at the Odeon, Leicester Square. Let's get this out of the way first: I like the book. Not being a voracious lover of fiction, I read it two years ago spurred on by all the talk, not expecting to like it - just reading it out of a broader cultural interest. It had me from page one. All the cliches apply: page-turner, unputdownable, a rattling good read. I even read Angels And Demons straight afterwards (not as good, but set in Rome, so fun for anyone who's been). I was under no illusions about its highbrow literary merit, but it struck me that Dan Brown could tell a story, and at least it had a vaguely intellectual core: art, religion, history, that type of thing. I didn't care whether it was true or not, I enjoyed the Catholic conspiracy at its heart, and I fell for the Leonardo clues, eagerly looking up the paintings and examing the positioning of hands and so on. A visit to Paris last March was made more interesting by having read the novel. What harm could it do? What irks me is the way The Da Vinci Code has become shorthand, within the media, for crap. It certainly has narrative holes, and I've read The Rough Guide, with all the inaccuracies and falsehoods helpfully highlighted. That's good sport. In Angels and Demons Brown invents a disgraced British tabloid reporter who apparently worked for the Tatler, then got a job working as the Rome correspondent for the BBC. Preposterous, and indicative of how lazy a researcher Dan Brown can be. But a page-turner is a page-turner and the snobbery against his popularity from the chattering classes is undeserved and patronising to the millions that have enjoyed the book. I like the description of it in the latest New Yorker: "an anti-Christian polemic disguised as a beach read."
The film, ably directed by safe-pair-of-hands Ron Howard, mostly on location in London and Paris at night, with evocative results, is a perfectly serviceable middlebrow thriller. Few going to see it will not have read the book or heard about the conspiracy at its heart, so the big finish will be one of the least effctive since Titanic. This doesn't matter. The tale is well told, and Ian McKellen, as Professor Teabing, brings a welcome sense of camp fun. Paul Bettany is great as the mad monk Silas, too, the character singlehandedly causing a PR panic at Opus Dei, whose conservative Catholic members aren't all like that you know!
The big flaw with the film - apart from the poor desicion to cut to actuality of Mary Magdalene and the Crusades, which is a bit hokey - is Tom Hanks. He just doesn't cut it as a suave intellectual. If he turned up, even with his long hair, to deliver a power point presentation to me about ancient symbolism, I'd be hard pushed to take him seriously. And everyone who's read the book knows that it should have been Harrison Ford. Brown even describes Robert Langdon as looking like Harrison Ford. So where was he? That's the conspiracy.
Some of the reviws, including that of Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian (a man I like and respect) have been based on petty prejudice and mudslinging. The Da Vinci Code is not that bad. Put that on the poster!
posted by Andrew Collins @ 12:17 AM
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8 Comments:
Andrew,
They already sort of are. There was a tv spot for the film last night and the voice over slipped in something like 'Forget what you're heard ... discover 'The Da Vinci Code' for yourself.
Did you hear Mark Kermode's review on Five Live yesterday (available on listen again)? I'm sort of torn now because I often follow your opinion and his -- I guess I'll just end up going to see it just to see who's right ...
Yeah, I didn't think it was terrible, just dull - like three not-great TV movies glued together. The dialogue was astonishingly poor, which is a constant in an Akiva Goldsman script, but may well be the fault of the source novel. I only read the first couple of pages of the book and thought 'hmm' and 'no' and 'not for me', so I'm not sure who's to blame there.
Thought Tom Hanks was okay though - I've actually met a few of the sort of American professor who writes that sort of book, and the hair/clothes/demeanour was spot on. His utter lack of any kind of sense of humour/constant confusion at what he'd got himself into also seems to correlate quite well to Dan Brown himself, although maybe I'm reading too much into that.
Paul Bettany and Alfred Molina were clearly having enormous fun though, which is as good a reason for spending dozens of millions of pounds as any...
I went today with my mum and my daughter. I'd read (and loved) the book, mum hated it and daughter hadn't read it at all. As for the film they absolutely loved it, whereas I was a bit disappointed. Paul Bettany was just wrong as Silas (lovely bottom though), his accent sounded like he was doing a bad Godfather impression, I kept expecting "Respect the family" from him.
I think in spite of the length of the film, the story felt a bit rushed.
Other than that it was a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
Eurovision was better though, I like my cheese by the bucket-load!
James Henry raises an interesting point: does Dan Brown see himself as Harrison Ford, where others see him as Tom Hanks? Or is Harrison Ford to Dan Brown what Tom Hanks is to Ron Howard?
Andrew, I thought that around the time you read the book you summed it up on your 6Music show with words to the effect of: "It's rubbish though, isn't it?" Or was that just about the central conspiracy?
I haven't read the book or seen the film, but I've seen enough documentaries to know that the grail theory is seriously flawed, and Da Vinci was too busy inventing photography and forging the Turin Shroud to have anything to do with any other grail conspiracy. I know the book is fiction that dresses itself up as fact, and there is a sort of satisfying symmetry in seeing so many people having some faith in it. (It's sad that Jesus wasn't into wealth and all that: next to Dan Brown and the Pope he looks like such a loser.) It just seems a shame that effectively they're fighting bollocks with bollocks.
(Shouldn't "power point" be PowerPoint by the way, or has the term become a sort of hoover-style generic shorthand? Or were they already called "power point presentations" and Microsoft just nicked the name?)
While we're reading for correctness, let's refer to the Renaissance artist and inventor by his given name, Leonardo, not his hometown. :)
And according to Wikipedia, Microsoft bought PowerPoint after it was released for Macs. This time, the blame doesn't go to Microsoft.
Finally, what has most boggled my mind regarding The Da Vinci Code controversy is the insistence on accuracy in this work of fiction. Maybe I'm just an ignorant atheist, but isn't the crucial question whether or not it's a good read?
Gaby, I wasn't really trying to be picky with Andrew; I was asking out of interest. (And at least I called Jesus Jesus and not Of Nazareth.) So Microsoft acquired someone else's successful product? I can hardly believe it.
I'm certainly an ignorant atheist and I'm not commenting on the quality of the book because I haven't read it. However I believe it starts with a declaration that various things in the book are facts (including, disingenuously, the existence of the Priory of Sion). Rather a lot of people appear to take it as gospel. It's hardly surprising that the Church is worried: so many credulous people out there and it missed them.
Lazy researcher is doing Mr Brown a disservice I think, pretty bloody non-existent researcher is more like it. I sniffed something was wrong when he gave an English character the surname 'Teabing'. I mean, really.
It's an anagram of Michael Baigent's surname. He's one of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. You'd have thought 'Beating' would have made a more suitable name. Perhaps he wanted to draw attention to its anagrammatic nature.
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